Line-editing: what on earth is it?

Not so very long ago, a chum of mine ruffled a lot of feathers in an editorial forum by asking (tongue in cheek, for the most part) whether line-editing even exists. Cue a lot of indie-fiction editors piling in, highly aggrieved, who market line-editing services. Of course it exists, they averred!

Why does this matter?

It matters because precision matters when it comes to contracts for editing services. Clarity matters when an editor is marketing their services, and an author or publisher is looking for a provider of that service.

Publishing is awash with overlapping job descriptions, different names for the same thing, the same name meaning different things and, frankly, it’s unfair to clients. Further, a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, this lack of clarity of the definition of terms can mean that what a client thinks they’re buying isn’t what an editor thinks they’re selling.

My (non-fiction editor) chum’s point was that line-editing, however defined (and I’ll get to that, not that it will help a great deal), is simply a part of what goes on in copyediting. And from my non-fiction world, I agree with him.

Some editors servicing the indie-fiction sector, however, provide line-editing as a separate service, and charge separately for copyediting, which seems to us non-fiction folk like charging twice for the same thing… but it’s defended as giving the author a choice of where to spend their money, with options broken down into smaller chunks. OK, then.

As a copyeditor, I discuss the scope of work with potential clients, and the fee and deadline are settled in accordance with the agreed scope. It’s entirely possible to agree work that doesn’t include certain tasks, or majors on others. But if it helps indie-fiction editors communicate with their authors by separating out whatever they mean by ‘line-editing’, well, that’s OK too.

It was clear, however, in that forum, that what one line-editor calls line-editing doesn’t necessarily match the next line-editor’s view.

The term ‘line-editing’ only emerged in the 2010s so far as I can make out, and I first came across it in Facebook posts by American editors of indie fiction. It wasn’t in common usage in the UK at that time.

It’s therefore clear that line-editing (by that name) is not part of the traditional route to publication, honed over centuries. To help understand better what is going on with this newfangled line-editing (frankly, as bad a label as most labels in publishing – copyeditors and proofreaders definitely work line by line!), a few days before writing this article I attended a line-editing workshop run by the Publishing Training Centre.

From that workshop I understand line-editing to be a heavy edit for language prior to the text entering the production process to be published. It’s done whilst the text is still fluid, before submission to the publisher.

What’s submitted to the publisher ought to be what’s intended to go into print, although an army of copyeditors and proofreaders are on hand to ensure that what does go into print (or the ebook or the PDF) is top-notch quality in terms of spelling, grammar, punctuation and expression, the images and captions and text lining up, references being accurate, notes making sense and being in the right place and so on.

The copyeditor will edit goofs in sentences or raise author queries if it’s not clear what was intended. The copyeditor may also be tasked by the publisher with providing a heavier language edit. The proofreader is there to pick up any remaining goofs and to verify the typesetter’s work.

The difference between line-editing and copyediting

Even after the workshop, I’m not wholly convinced there is one. The definitions we were given were open to interpretation, and in the exercises we were encouraged to address spelling, punctuation and grammar errors even in otherwise OK text (which is to say, picking up things that a copyeditor would expect to do, given the definitions we were given). Consistency was also mentioned, which is a copyeditor’s purpose in life (right up to the point where consistency is a nonsense in the context – we’re not barbarians!).

Line-editors do not prepare the text for publication, which means that they neither style the text nor use tags to communicate to the typesetter what the different levels of headings are, what’s a quotation and so on. They’re not expected to make the book conform to the publisher’s house style (if there is a publisher in the mix). These are the copyeditor’s responsibilities.

Line-editors do make changes where it’s obvious what needs doing, raise author queries where the text is ambiguous or plain confusing, and make suggestions to improve awkward writing. Just as copyeditors do.

The workshop also made clear that line-editing isn’t the same as developmental editing, where the structure and content of the book are being worked out.

The discussion in that fizzing editorial forum suggested that line-editing straddles the boundary between developmental (also called structural) editing and copyediting, but the workshop suggested instead that it squeezes in between the two. And yet, and yet…

I found nothing in the line-editing workshop that I wouldn’t do as a copyeditor, although the exercises (artificially crammed with faults, or they’d not be worth doing) did invite heavier intervention that I’d often need to do within my copyediting role.

Still – the book I’m editing at the moment has required a heavy language edit. And I mean heavy. The publisher has confirmed that I’m to crack on and get it all done, as the copyeditor. In the indie-fiction world, there’s no reason why a decent copyeditor faced with such text wouldn’t, or couldn’t, just do the work (for a suitable fee and with a suitable deadline).

Untangling what different kinds of editors do

The question of what, exactly, line-editing is came up on the Chicago Manual of Style’s Q&A webpage in November 2021 and the editors referred readers to the book What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing, edited by Peter Ginna (University of Chicago Press, 2017). There is a chapter on line-editing (by George Witte) and another on copyediting (by the wonderful Carol Fisher Saller).

Unfortunately, we still don’t have clear definitions. Witte says that the line-editor can restructure the plot – the workshop I attended made it clear that this is far beyond the line-editor’s remit. He also says:

People who don’t work in publishing often mistake copyediting for line editing, and with good reason; many copyeditors do the work that line editors should have done. The job of a copyeditor is to prepare a manuscript to be set in type; all professional copyeditors are trained to apply a set of printer’s marks (or today, electronic codes) to the pages of a manuscript. (p. 97/loc. 1797)

He goes on to say what copyeditors do: tightening sentences and reshaping paragraphs – as good a description of line-editing as I’ve yet seen!

And then we get this:

Most copyeditors, however, will not undertake a full, top-to-bottom edit of every line of every page, nor will they suggest significant structural changes to a book. (pp. 97–98/loc. 1804)

Er, excuse me? That’s exactly what this copyeditor does! And the copyeditors I know! I rarely have to suggest ‘significant structural changes’ because the material I work on has already been peer-reviewed and such matters have been worked out, but there’s always the odd book that slips through the net and needs further thought for the coherent development of its argument.

In any event, I think Witte is living in a different world from me – pressure on budgets means as much work out of as few hands as possible. Publishing is no different from any other industry in that regard.

So, how does Saller define copyediting?

[It] means scrutinizing every inch of that document for grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and good expression. (p. 106/loc. 1969)

So – quite a different view from Witte, and much more in line with my own experience.

But the book hasn’t finished – this is from the glossary:

line editing. Detailed editing of a manuscript – line by line, as the term suggests – but not necessarily correcting all fine points of grammar, punctuation, or style, which is the task of copyediting. (pp. 282–283/loc. 5154)

copyediting. Usually the final editorial stage of preparing a manuscript for publication – a meticulous read for technical errors, style, and internal consistency, along with marking or electronically coding the text to be ready for typesetting. (pp. 277–278/loc. 5017)

The line-editing workshop certainly expected us to read meticulously, a task here described as copyediting’s purview, and to correct the fine points of grammar and punctuation. Again – confusion, but my copyediting practice encompasses the entirety of these two definitions.

Authors and editors

I think there’s a difference between the fiction and non-fiction worlds, and between independent publication and traditional publication.

The novice indie author may well want (or need, anyway) a hand with getting their thoughts into good writing. Certainly, if basic problems with stringing cogent sentences that serve the story well are fixed (and non-fiction is story, too, I maintain), then the copyeditor’s job will be more streamlined as they’re working on more polished text.

It makes sense that repeated work refining the prose and smoothing the language, or punching it up, or changing its pace, will end up with a better experience for the reader. And that is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Who wants to write a book that no one wants to read?

The poorer the initial writing, the more editing it will need. To save editor exhaustion, no one is expected to do it all. If that means having one round of editing that focuses on clearing up the worst of the infelicities, fine.

Authors need to learn to self-edit, they need to learn to take criticism well from their beta-readers (or peer reviewers), they need to read and read and read in their genre, and maybe read up on the theory of the kind of writing they do to help write better quality text from the get-go and thus be able to diagnose some of their own writing weaknesses and to fix them.

Authors also need to learn that publication, traditional or independent, is necessarily a group effort. I frequently say that the best tool in my armoury is my fresh pair of eyes when I come to a text. The more fresh pairs of eyes on a text before the print button is pressed, the better. Perfection is not guaranteed, but excellence is the target.

If one of those fresh pairs of eyes wants to call itself ‘line-editor’, fine. But, so far as I can tell, line-editors do what any well-trained and talented copyeditor can do. Line-editors skim off the language aspect. Some of them dismiss copyediting as ‘the technical, mechanical’ stuff (which annoys copyeditors no end – even when heavy language editing is not required, there’s a great deal of skill, knowledge and, yes, artistry required to be a good copyeditor).

Does line-editing exist?

One thing is clear – publishing experts can’t agree on what line-editing is, nor where the boundaries lie between neighbouring parts of the process of readying text for publication. Such boundaries as there are, are fuzzy.

If you want more on the different kinds of editing, I blogged about it a couple of years ago.

So, in answer to my chum’s question – whether line-editing exists – I can say yeah, kinda. It’s part of traditional, full-service copyediting, but some people prefer to market it separately.

Or, as the Bard put it:

That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.